Better WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

This is a Hard Fork of the original WordPress Plugin Boilerplate. The Better WordPress Plugin Boilerplate actively takes PRs and is maintained and under active development, as well has more features than the original. The goal is still a standardized, organized, object-oriented foundation for building high-quality WordPress Plugins, however actively accepting cooperations, and also considering ClassicPress Compatibility.

In the case ClassicPress and WordPress diverge too much in future we will consider creating a new, standalone repo just for ClassicPress. However as it stands of today, 2021-07-9 (9th July 2021) the Codebase of both CMS are still compliant.

A Generator Plugin to generate new Plugins by filling out a form is available here and acts like a WordPress Plugin. It can be used to generate a Plugin based on any boilerplate source really, but uses by default the Better WordPress Plugin Boilerplate.

The generator form will soon be online on a standalone website as well.

Features

• The Boilerplate is based on the Plugin API, Coding Standards, and Documentation Standards.
• The plugin is 100% WPCS (WordPress Code Sniffer) Compliant.
• All classes, functions, and variables are documented so that you know what you need to change.
• The Boilerplate uses a strict file organization scheme that corresponds both to the WordPress Plugin Repository structure, and that makes it easy to organize the files that compose the plugin.
• The project includes a .pot file as a starting point for internationalization.

How to Create a Plugin

The Better WordPress Plugin Boilerplate (everything inside and inclusive the folder plugin-name of this repo) can be installed directly into your plugins folder "as-is".

You will want to rename it and the classes and methods inside of it to fit your needs. Some comments inside the Boilerplate may need to be rewritten as well, and adapted to your code/use case.

For example, if your plugin is named 'example-me' then:

• rename files from plugin-name to example-me
• change plugin_name to example_me
• change plugin-name to example-me
• change Plugin_Name to Example_Me
• change PLUGIN_NAME_ to EXAMPLE_ME_

It's safe to activate the plugin at this point. Because the Boilerplate has no real functionality there will be no menu items, meta boxes, or custom post types added until you write the code, of course.

For simplicity, you can just use the TukuToi Boilerplate Generator Plugin, or the Webform (coming soon), to generate a starter plate using your file-, class-, method- names (and prefixes, authorname, etc etc).

Submit a Plugin to WordPress.org

[Comin soon] instructions and example folder boilerplate to use when submitting a plugin to WordPress.

What About Contributing?

Submit your idea to the Discussions for the community to approve. Each Idea needs at least 2 distinct thumbs up (additional to the OP) to be considered for implemenation.

Additionally to the Discussions Post, if you have working code to implement your Idea, please add a PR to the develop branch. PR'd ideas still need at least 2 additional thumbs up in the Discussion post to be merged.

Note that in special cases (security, quality, yada yada) we may or may not merge the code and may or may not add or remove features discussed at our own will, independent from the amoung of thumbsup.

The Better WordPress Plugin Boilerplate follows PHP, WP Coding standards and has the Git Actions for it incorporated. We also follow Keep A Changelog for changelogs and SemVer for Versioning.

Documentation, FAQs, and More

If you’re interested in writing any documentation or creating tutorials please let's discuss in the Discussions section of this Repo.

Credits

The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate was started in 2011 by Tom McFarlin and has since included a number of great contributions. In March of 2015 the project was handed over by Tom to Devin Vinson.

The version of which the the Better WordPress Plugin Boilerplate hard-fork was taken was developed in conjunction with Josh Eaton, Ulrich Pogson, and Brad Vincent.

From 2021-07-5 (July 05th 2021) onwards , the Better WordPress Plugin Boilerplate is maintained by TukuToi and the active community. We hard-forked the project (which means GitHub has detached the fork and made it a standalone project) because the current development on the existing Boilerplate Repo is stalling since several years, and things started to get oudated (and that won't get any better with time to go by).

We saw an opportunity here to continue a great project and develop it further, also with great ideas of the community itself.